Todd B:

That video is genius!  I have no idea how it had been around since summer and only had 17K views (it's up to 24K now).

Paul:

I was initially skeptical of the PHD food apple, but you've made it into a helpful reference.  And I laughed when I first noticed the brown apple stem labeled "Chocolate".

My best holiday wishes to you and Shou-Ching!

goddesslynne:

That's a great article!  It reminds us that devices we now take for granted — like clothes washers and dryers — really did save women a lot of labor.

It also reminds us that automobiles went very quickly from "luxury" to "mandatory" in just a few decades…the entire concept of the "suburb" assumes that everyone owns an automobile, because it's no longer possible to walk to anywhere that sells food or other daily necessities.

I'm glad you like the T-shirts!  Nothing but first quality will do for my readers.

Timothy:

I'm not sure if the government has ever been interested in nutrition: dietary recommendations have always been "eat more of what we're producing".  I believe the change in recommendations is mostly due to the massive change in US farm policy in the early 1970s (due to Earl Butz) — from one designed to maintain price stability for a nation of mostly small farmers, to one designed to produce the maximum output of a few commodity grain crops from large industrial farms.

Jennifer:

I think the major health problems in 1943 were being shot by the Germans or Japanese!

Keoni:

Pyramids have stood for authority since ancient Egypt, all the way through the one on our dollar bills.

You can't live or work in a pyramid: it's of absolutely no use to anyone.  What a pyramid says is "You are my slave, and I will make you stack rocks until you die.  You and your family will be reminded of my power over you every waking moment by the shadow of this gigantic useless edifice that towers over you." 

The Aztecs underscored the point by sacrificing people on them.

Paul:

Building one is the hard part: it generally requires a kingdom and a steady supply of slaves.  Get cracking!

Brynn:

Would it be enriched by adding spices?  No one can say.

JS

eddie, John:

Those are both important pieces of the puzzle, and they're related.  The statistics clearly show that fat was not just replaced by sugar in our diet -- we ate far more calories in total, and the increase was almost all from sugar.  I'm sure that cheap HFCS had something to do with that.

One of the important facts I try to keep in mind when puzzling out reasons for increased obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome in America is "Did the prevalence of this activity accelerate dramatically after 1978?"  

It's not enough for the prevalence to be rising smoothly -- because that doesn't explain the acceleration of obesity that began sometime between 1978 and 1988.  That's why I don't find hypotheses like "People became lazy and gluttonous and that's why we're fat" or "Food became tasty and that's why we're fat" to be compelling: people didn't suddenly become lazy in 1978, and food didn't suddenly become tasty in 1978 either.

Yes, the rate of fast food consumption was increasing...but it had been increasing steadily since the late 1950s, yet obesity didn't accelerate until after 1978.  Also recall that the 1970s were the golden age of junk food and advertising to kids: perhaps I'll post some scans from comic books of the era. 

I think that our agricultural policy was the primary driver: as I said above, it shifted from maintaining profitability for small farmers to maximizing production for a few commodity crops (corn, soy, wheat, cotton).  This created mountains of cheap surplus corn, soy, and wheat that needed to be eaten.  Therefore, our dietary guidelines changed to emphasize the consumption of products made from corn, soy, and wheat (e.g. "whole grains", "vegetable oils") -- and manufacturers naturally took advantage of the cheap grains to produce processed food products based on them (cereal, bread, pasta, chips and fried snack foods, sodas, cookies, and sweets via HFCS).  

The combination of cheap grain-based ingredients and institutional support for their consumption is, I believe, the largest contributor to obesity -- though the mechanisms by which that occurs are still being investigated, and I believe there are major roles for other contributors.

JS